to show that, because most forms of oppression have been constructed, they can be deconstructed; to demonstrate that what is was not always so in the past and therefore need not be so in the future. The historian must be, in this sense, a social critic; for it’s by means of such criticism that the past liberates even as it oppresses the present and future—very much as the historian, however paradoxically, simultaneously performs both acts upon the past itself.
